Tag Archives: ethics

All Things New: God’s Bringing Creation to Its Glorious Destiny

Posted on by

There is a fascinating website called “The High Calling,” dedicated to a Christian view of work and vocation. Each week they feature a different theme. The theme for the last week of October 2014 was “Designed to Work.” I recently posted (with permission) an article by Bob Robinson that was part of this theme, called “Made in God’s Image.”

Bob invited me to write an article on the theme for the second week of January 2015, which is “All Things New.” My article, entitled “Bringing Creation to Its Glorious Destiny,” tells how I moved from being a dualist, with a sacred/secular worldview, to embracing a wider vision of God’s redemption of creation.

I recommend you check out this wonderful website for its range of interesting articles (print and video) on a holistic view of work and vocation.

More Discussion and Clarification of My Views on Eschatology (Jesus Creed Blog)

Posted on by

A couple days ago Scot McKnight (New Testament scholar; prolific author and blogger) posted a review of my book, A New Heaven and a New Earth. This generated a number of comments, some of which seemed to misunderstand what I was saying, so I responded with clarifications. I then got further questions, and I responded again. I’ve highlighted below some of my responses, for those interested.

The Motive for Ethical Living Today

One commenter wondered whether “new heavens and new earth eschatology should be a motive and basis for caring for creation and culture,” since there are people without this eschatology who are, in fact, concerned for this world.

This is how I responded:

I am basically a Wesleyan in orientation. This means that it isn’t some abstract concept of the eschaton that motivates me to care about this world. Rather, as one who passionately desires to be conformed to God’s image and thus to manifest what Wesley called “social holiness” in my life of discipleship, I want to love what God loves.

So I understand the promise of the renewal of creation, which began with Christ’s resurrection, and which can be a reality in the life of the church, to signify the heart of God.

My motivation to love the world (human and non-human) with God’s love, empowered by Christ’s Spirit, and thus manifest the imago Dei, is grounded in God’s unswerving commitment to humanity and creation after sin (see Genesis 9), and to Israel after the idolatry of the Golden Calf (see Exodus 34), and to the disciples after their abandonment of Jesus (and I could keep adding to that pattern, which recurs throughout Scripture), which culminates with the new heaven and new earth or the reconciliation of all things through Christ.

Have Christians Throughout History Always Thought of “Heaven” as Otherworldly?

On of the points that Scot McKnight himself raised in the review is that it is inaccurate to characterize all Christian speculation about the afterlife as otherworldly.

I responded:

I wanted to comment on your point that the history of eschatology suggests that not all Christian visions of the afterlife have consisted in an otherworldly, ethereal “heaven.” You’re absolutely right there, as I think my survey of eschatology (in the Appendix to my book) verifies.

However, you seem to be claiming more than I do, namely that it has been somewhat common for Christians to envision a new heaven and new earth as the final state (and you mention the history of heaven book by McDannell and Lang). I’m not sure I agree. Or, at least, it may be that I interpret the same data differently.

Part of the issue is that it has been typical to envision “heaven” in concrete earthly terms, while believing that it is some sort of hyper (non-earthly) reality. This is analogous to the point Caroline Walker Bynum makes in her book, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336. She notes that despite the influence of Platonism on Christian visions of the afterlife, the impact of the biblical teaching of the resurrection of the body led even those Christians who shunned a physical vision of the eschaton to conceive of immaterial “bodies” (whatever that means). Likewise, it seems to me that many have transferred concrete elements of the known world to the afterlife, even when the final reality is thought of as immaterial.

Beyond that, however, many Christians (especially in modern times) have envisioned the afterlife as a perfect replica of this world, without thinking of of it as the redemption of this world. Rather, what is envisioned is another, better world. To me, this difference is crucial, since it is the renewal of this world that articulates the vision I am interested in (even a replacement cosmos won’t do).

How Often Does the Bible Speak of New Creation?

One of the points McKnight made is that only Isaiah and Revelation speak of “a new heaven and a new earth,” so we shouldn’t think that this theme is all that common in the Bible. I was not the only person who responded to this point. One respondent pointed out the transformation of the cosmos mentioned in Hebrews 1 and 12, and in Romans 8.

So I joined the discussion:

I would agree that Isaiah 65:17-25 (also 66:22) and Revelation 21:1 aren’t the only places in Scripture that address the new creation. Beyond these two texts that explicitly use the phrase “a new heaven and a new earth,” there is 2 Peter 3:13.

But, of course, as you intimate, new creation is addressed in many more places in the Bible than where the phrase “a new heaven and a new earth” appears.

In the book, I address some of the clearest New Testament texts, such as Acts 3:21 (the restoration of “all things”), Ephesians 1:10 (the gathering up of “all things” in Christ), Colossians 1:20 (the reconciliation of “all things” in Christ), and Romans 8 (the liberation of creation itself from its bondage to decay, so that it might experience the same glory as the children of God). Both the Ephesians and Colossian texts specify “all things” as all things in heaven and on earth, thereby alluding to the cosmos God made in the beginning (when God created “the heaven and the earth”).

But many other texts also address the same reality, using different language. I actually address the text in Hebrews that speaks of the “changing” of the cosmos (parallel to Paul talking about being changed and clothed with the resurrection body, like a new suit of clothes, in 1 Corinthians 15:50-54).

So I think the theme of new creation is much broader than the phrase “a new heaven and a new earth.” Part of the thrust of my book is to show this pervasiveness, which is not limited to specific lexical items. The book is thus an attempt at a biblical theology of the eschaton, where the eschaton is the logical unfolding and natural telos of God’s purposes from the beginning for the flourishing of the world he made.

The Problem of Animal Suffering in a Good Creation—Engaging Ronald Osborn’s Death Before the Fall (IVP, 2014), Part 1

Posted on by

I’ve been interested in the question of how the Bible addresses the problem of suffering for a long time. This is sometimes called the theodicy problem—from the Greek for God (theos) and justice (dikē). Many writers through history have tried to “justify” God in light of the reality of suffering.

My own interest in this question is based both on theology and personal experience.

First of all, I am drawn to the Bible’s theological vision of a good creation. Having written quite a bit about God’s creational intent for the world’s flourishing (in articles and books), I am keenly aware of the need to grapple with the reality that the world does not at present match up with that ideal.

But it isn’t just that the world (out there) doesn’t match up to this ideal. Around the time I was coming to fully embrace a positive biblical vision of a good creation (having just completed a book on the Christian worldview), my life began to experience serious dissonance from this vision. As a result, I found it difficult over a period of some months to trust in God’s goodness. (I’ve recounted some of this story in a previous blog post.)

During this time I was introduced to the psalms of lament as a powerful resource for renewing trust in God in the midst of suffering. One outcome of this experience was an essay I wrote on the problem of suffering and evil that contrasted the attempt of classical theodicy to “solve” the problem with the more experiential approach of the lament psalms (“Why the ‘Greater Good’ Isn’t a Defense”). Another was the book that Brian Walsh and I wrote on Christian faith in a postmodern world.

The Question of Evolution and Evil

I’m now being pressed to think further about suffering, given what I’ve come to understand about the evolutionary processes uncovered by various sciences (including paleontology and genetics). I am interested in how we might think about the Bible’s presentation of origins (origin of the world, of humans, of evil) in light of cosmic, biological, and human evolution.

I will be presenting a paper that explores the origins of human evil in Genesis 3 in light of human evolution at a conference called “The Intersection of Evolution and the Fall” next March in Chicago.

One facet of this issue is the reality of death and suffering prior to the origin of human beings. It seems undeniable to me that that biological death, animal predation, and natural disasters all predate humanity. We are latecomers on the scene, and plants and animals (from bacteria to dinosaurs) were subject to death by extinction, predation, accident, disease, or simply old age (if they were lucky) long before us.

This means that we can’t reasonably attribute these factors to the results of human sin (a “curse” on nature). Indeed, my own re-reading of Genesis 3 and other biblical texts has helped me realize that the common Christian assumption that nature was systemically affected by of human sin isn’t clearly supported in Scripture. (I’ll get to the origin of this idea later.)

Even with this realization, questions remain. This is where Ronald Osborn’s thoughtful new book comes in.

Ronald E. Osborn. Death Before the Fall: Biblical Literalism and the Problem of Animal Suffering. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2014.

With vivid prose and an engaging perspective, Osborn addresses the problem of animal suffering for Christians, whether of “creationist” or evolutionary persuasions.

The book is tendentious (in the best sense of that term), arguing both for and against particular positions with passion and verve, yet it does not in the end come to a clear or unambiguous position on its primary topic, namely animal suffering. But the book certainly made me think, which (in my opinion) is high praise.

Osborn on Literalism

There are two prongs to Osborn’s argument, which make it, in effect, two books, or at least a book with two purposes, and two audiences. Part 1 (nine chapters) attempts to help conservative Christians move out of narrow literalism in their reading of the Bible’s creation narratives (by literalism he means an approach to the text that assumes a simple correspondence between what the Bible says and concrete realities in the external world); this approach tends to be associated with a young earth and treats the Noahic flood as the explanation for the fossil record.

Osborn is uniquely qualified to address this sort of literalism, since he was raised in the Seventh Day Adventist church. Although he doesn’t go into details about this, it was the founder of the SDA church (Ellen G. White) who popularized the view that flood geology (and not deep time) decisively explained the current fossil record (this having been revealed to her in a vision, in which she claimed to have actually observed the flood).

This interpretation of the fossil record (along with its assumption of a young earth, and the lack evolutionary descent) informed the hermeneutics of William Jennings Byran, the famous prosecutor in the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 (Byran had read SDA literature on this topic). To this day, many in the SDA church are principled defenders of young earth creationism.

Since I do not count myself among those who read the Bible this way, I was less interested in part 1 of Osborn’s book. Nevertheless, there are some good chapters here. These include chap. 2: “Unwholesome Complexity,” which shows just how certain creationist readings end up tying the reader into interpretive knots, and chap. 6: “The Enclave Mentality,” which is perceptive about absolutism and the demonization of the other often found in fundamentalism.

I was particularly taken with the author’s characterization of the anxiety of a literalist reading of Scripture as “a high-stakes game of Jenga” (p. 45), where if you touch one of the bricks near the bottom the entire theological edifice might collapse. However, Osborn’s rhetoric in this section of the book can be dismissive at times, and might put off some readers who need to grapple with the important issues he raises here.

In my next two posts I will address part 2 of Osborn’s book, which explicitly addresses how we might think theologically about animal suffering.